On the corner of Pond View Road and Franklin Street in Riverhead sits a white church topped with a gold dome and orthodox cross. Flags of the U.S. and Ukraine wave in the breeze outside the church, where a banner beseeches: “Pray for Ukraine.”
Inside, a pastor leads the standing room only crowd in the divine liturgy, a service almost entirely sung in the native tongue of many who are assembled for the Sunday service. Most are Ukrainian immigrants. Others are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. For all, St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in Riverhead is not just a place of worship: It’s where they feel closest to home.
“I enjoy the people,” said Adrian Shmerykowsky, 88, of Shirley, who came to the United States from Ukraine in 1950. “It’s the only time I get to talk Ukrainian,” he added.
One of the few Ukrainian churches on Long Island, St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church celebrates its centennial this year.
The church’s founding purpose, to provide a house of worship and community for Ukrainian immigrants, is as alive today as it was 100 years ago, as a new influx of Ukrainian citizens immigrate to the U.S., seeking safety in America as war rages in their homeland.
“It’s very important to have that community here, because this represents Ukrainians. That’s who we are,” said Ihor Yaremchuk of Flanders. The church, he said, “unites people together.”
The church has also become a beacon for the support of Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion, shipping tons and tons of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
Pastor Bohdan Hedz considers the church “adding to the fabric of spirituality” in Riverhead and the surrounding communities.
“Ukrainian church in America, or outside of the geographical boundaries of Ukraine itself, is a very unique example of how we can accommodate or boil together traditions of our own that we bring in as immigrants… with local traditions,” Hedz said.
Ukrainian immigrants first began arriving here around the turn of the last century, Hedz said. Most were farmers from villages in western Ukraine who emigrated due to economic hardship in Europe. They settled on the rural East End, where farms were plentiful and farm labor was in demand.
According to a history kept by the church, the Ukrainian community on the East End had been organized through the Ukrainian National Association, a fraternal self-help and insurance organization, which established a branch in Riverhead in 1914. The membership of the Ukrainian National Association became the nucleus for Ukrainian social and community activities.
The group brought together the founders of the parish, which began organizing community meetings around 1922 and petitioned the Rev. Peter Poniatishin, the diocesan administrator for the Ruthenian Greek-Catholic Church in the United States — as it was then called — to authorize the formation of a Ukrainian Catholic parish in Riverhead. The organization of the church coincided with the second wave of Ukrainian immigrants to the United States, during World War I and in its aftermath, which saw the short-lived independence of Ukraine in 1917 and political revolutions in Russia.
Poniatishin, who lived in Newark, New Jersey, began coming out to Riverhead to celebrate the liturgy in the Ukrainian rite — which was held at the home of the Soroczynski family, who lived on Pond View Road — and to help organize the parish. A fundraising campaign for the church began in 1923 and, by the next year, the parishioners had raised enough money to buy land for their church.
The parish hired a Riverhead architect to design the church and a local construction company to build it. But the first fundraising campaign did not raise enough money to complete construction, so parishioners applied to Suffolk County National Bank for a mortgage. The bank’s loan committee rejected their application, but Frank Howell, the bank president, personally approved the $8,000 loan, saying, “I trust these men.”
The construction of the church took three months. The first liturgy in the church was held in December 1924.
The parish will celebrate its centennial with a banquet on Nov. 3 at East Wind Caterers in Wading River. The bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Diocese of Stamford, Paul Patrick Chomnycky, will be the parish’s special guest.
The church has traditionally been a social gathering place — and that’s no different now.
When liturgy ended on a recent Sunday, many parishioners stay behind to socialize. Some families head outside for an Easter egg hunt on church grounds, while others head downstairs for refreshments.
The lower level room is filled with conversation and laughter as a few dozen churchgoers catch up and talk about their week.
Rouslan Roubyshyn of Coram, who started coming to the Riverhead church around 12 years ago, said what sets the church apart is the ability to speak his native tongue with other Ukrainians. It’s “nostalgic,” he said.
Adrian Shmerykowsky is there with his grandson, Trevor Flores. Trevor, 16, started coming to the Ukrainian church with his grandfather last year. The church’s services in Ukrainian and his grandfather are helping him learn the Ukrainian language.
“The people definitely have something to do with it,” Trevor said, explaining why he keeps coming back to the church. “I enjoy a lot of people here, but I also enjoy the ceremony and how it’s done. As opposed to other churches I’ve been to, this one definitely feels a lot more spiritual, a lot more connected with God. I like the singing; it really brings your soul into it.”
Zhanna Mezhenskay, 37, immigrated to the U.S. eight years ago. Now living in Hampton Bays, she has been coming to the church for about a month.
“I came here just to feel more connected to our people,” she said. “It feels a little bit like you’re at home.”
On other days of the week, the church basement is home to various activities and community groups. On Saturdays, it hosts a Ukrainian heritage school affiliated with the church, where children celebrate and participate in activities surrounding Ukrainian culture. Mezhenskay, an artist, volunteered to lead an art therapy class for the school.
Mezhenskay said she feels happy she could give back to the church. The parish feels like a family, she said.
“My parents are not in the U.S.. For all these eight years, I’m by myself,” she said. “So to have not just the church, but friendly people [and] to have this kind of tradition — and they let you do something for the church — it’s kind of helped me.”
Other days, the basement is a classroom for adults to learn English from bilingual parishioners. The church also opens its doors to outside groups, like Alcoholics Anonymous.
The church’s biggest event — and its largest fundraiser — is an annual chicken barbecue. First held in 1960, the barbecue draws roughly 1,000 people — primarily non-Ukrainians — to the church grounds for live Ukrainian music and authentic Ukrainian foods.
“It started out as a small barbecue, now it’s like a festival,” said Carolyn Smith, 77, of Riverhead, who has been coming to the church since she was a girl.
“It’s out of great love that this parish has this tradition,” Hedz said. He said parishioners volunteer for the barbecue and host it every year out of pride for their heritage, their culture and their church.
“I’m blessed as a pastor to witness this — this love that people have for this church, for our traditions, for this community, for being a family. It’s great,” Hedz said. “This parish has a future.”
The church wasn’t always this lively, trustee Anthony Popowicz said. When he came to the church in 1984, it was primarily an English-speaking group, made up of first- and second-generation Americans whose parents were from Ukraine. In the last 30 years, he said, the church has received new life as the parish gets filled with new waves of Ukrainian immigrants.
Fifteen years ago, Popowicz said, there were no altar boys, “Now they’re falling off the steps, there’s so many of them.”
Roughly 35-40% of people who attend St. John the Baptist’s Ukrainian language service are recent immigrants from Ukraine, Hedz said. Some parishioners have taken in people or families who fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began. Taking in refugees has deep roots in the church; between 1949 and 1956, the church organized and coordinated a parish campaign of sponsorship that brought 74 Ukrainian refugee families to Long Island, according to the church’s history.
Denise and Christopher Magyar of Mattituck are currently hosting a refugee family. Once the home of Denise’s parents, and where she took care of her mother until her death, the family’s presence gives the home “new life,” she said.
“There was very little life or quality in that house, and I’ve had no children. So now I have a 40-year-old son, a 38-year-old daughter-in-law and a grandchild who just turned 12,” Denise said with a laugh. “God works in mysterious ways.”
In the two hours before the Ukrainian liturgy, Hedz leads a smaller group of English speakers, including the Magyars, in a separate liturgy.
Peter Gevinski, 60, of Riverhead has been attending the Ukrainian Catholic church most of his life. “I come to church almost every day to thank God for the great life he has given me,” he said.
He attends services with his fiancee, Victoria Eleanor Heilig, 50, of Center Moriches, who started coming when she and Gevinski got together five years ago. The couple will be married in the church next month.
“It’s just where I feel like I belong,” Heilig said.
Joe Lavinio, 83, started coming to the church on holidays as a boy with his grandmother, an Italo-Greek Catholic from Sicily. “This was the only church that did the sign of the cross ‘backwards,’” he said.
He started coming on a regular basis as a teenager and “fell in love with the liturgy.” He continued attending Eastern Catholic churches throughout his life. When he moved to Southampton, he began attending the Riverhead church again.
Lavinio decided to become a deacon after his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and plays a role in the liturgy. He married his wife, Marie, in the church in 2015.
When asked what makes the church special, some parishioners point to its warmth and community. But they also point to its spiritual leader, Bohdan Hedz.
Hedz, 42, became the pastor at St. John the Baptist almost 10 years ago.
He graduated high school in Ukraine in 1998 and came to the United States to study at the Ukrainian Catholic church’s seminary in Stamford, Connecticut.
His first experience in the Riverhead church was as a student, when he visited during the Lenten season. He can remember the dark wood panels of the church — which have since been changed — and the people being “very nice” and “very open.”
After getting his degree in theology and philosophy, he served as a deacon and assistant priest at churches in upstate New York. In September 2014 he moved to Riverhead on his first pastoral assignment.
Baiting Hollow resident Michael Skopyk, 17, said he looks up to Hedz. A former altar boy whose parents are from Ukraine, Michael said the church is a special place where parishioners “treat you like family.”
Parishioners say they appreciate that Hedz, who is married and the father of two, has a family. He “understands human relationships,” longtime parishioner Carolyn Smith said.
Hedz is “by far the best” priest the church has had,” she said. “He’s brought so many into [the church].”
For his leadership in the Ukrainian community, Hedz was named the 2022 Riverhead News-Review’s Person of the Year and was honored in 2023 by the Suffolk County Legislature as a “Champion of Diversity.”
“I want to emphasize that in every community it’s not the priest that is very important,” Hedz said in response to praise from churchgoers. “My role is important. Yes, I do realize that. But the people — the people are the ones that are making this community alive. If there were no people, no matter who you have as a priest — you could have Pope Francis as a parish priest — if there are no people, nothing would have happened.”
The people are also the ones that have driven the church’s most high-profile activity in the last two years: its support for Ukraine’s resistance against Russian invasion. It’s what some churchgoers say they are most proud of.
Immediately after the Russian invasion started on Feb. 24, 2022, the parish mobilized. It organized an anti-war rally outside Riverhead Town Hall and Ukrainian Independence Day flag-raising ceremonies. Ukrainian Independence Day is celebrated on Aug. 24, to commemorate the anniversary of the day in 1991 the country declared independence from the Soviet Union.
With Ukraine under siege, the parish began collecting donations to send to people displaced by the conflict and for soldiers in Ukraine. When the war started, parishioners recall more than half of the church’s basement being filled with boxes of aid getting ready to be shipped overseas.
“We’re small, but we did a lot,” Deacon Lavinio said. “And people in the community as far as Amagansett and Orient came to help. So it was really wonderful to see different denominations come with boxes and boxes of stuff that we could send off and ship [to Ukraine].”
The church has likely shipped around 50 tons of donations overseas to Ukraine and to refugees from Ukraine, according to Hedz. (The church stopped counting after 40 tons, he said.) The church has collected more than $350,000 in donations from different organizations and individuals, Popowicz said.
“This parish has been phenomenal. They are doing a lot.” Hedz said. “If you need them, and even if you don’t need them, they will show up and they will help you, whether it’s collecting stuff, packing stuff, shipping stuff, lifting stuff [or] donating. People have been very generous.”
“And bear in mind,” he added, “that a lot of them have a family member who’s fighting, have a family member who is wounded, have a family member who died at war.”
Hanging in the basement are two Ukrainian flags signed by Ukrainian soldiers, sent to the church as tokens of thanks for the aid. “I hope all of them are still alive,” parishioner Ihor Yaremchuk said.
The flags aren’t the only tokens of thanks in the church. A glass case in the church’s lobby displays letters of appreciation from various groups in Ukraine.
One of them is from Ukraine’s International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine — a force composed of foreign volunteers created by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy two years ago — thanking the church “for active assistance in strengthening the country’s defence capabilities and providing humanitarian assistance during the resistance to the invasion of russian invaders on the territory of Ukraine.”
Several parishioners have supplemented the church’s donations with their own fundraising effort. That nonprofit organization, Help UA, raises money primarily through yard sales and other donation drives. Help UA has raised roughly $200,000 since the war started, two of its founders, Ihor Yaremchuk and Andriy Dzoban said.
“Without the church, we wouldn’t have done as much as we have done,” Yaremchuk said. The Ukrainian church in the United States, he said, acts like diplomats between two countries.
In addition to the flags and letters of appreciation, there are dozens of Facebook posts from recipients of the aid thanking the church and HelpUA for the supplies they have sent overseas.
The parish has felt sorrow from the war. “We pray a lot for the deceased heroes of Ukraine,” Hedz said. “We pray a lot for those people who have been captured and are imprisoned as prisoners of war. We pray a lot now for people who have been displaced or wounded.”
“We are losing the best people. The young people. The future,” Hedz said. “Under normal circumstances, their mission would be to build a nation, to develop it into the future for their kids, to bring up children. They’re dying right now.”
The most recent foreign aid bill signed by President Joe Biden makes Hedz more optimistic. The law provides $61 billion for Ukraine’s defense against Russia. In a post on X this week, President Zelenskyy described the aid package as “powerful, strengthening our air finesse as well as long-range and artillery capabilities.”
Russia’s war against Ukraine is a war against democracy, Hedz said, and it is important for the United States, as a global symbol of democracy, to stand up for Ukraine’s freedom.
“I feel hopeful now, that, finally, there’s going to be change. I know we are not going to celebrate victory this year. We wish we could. But we are in it for the long run,” Hedz said. “The world will never be the same, that’s the bottom line.”
Throughout it all, Hedz said his faith has remained the same. “It wasn’t shaken by the whole event, because it’s just reaffirming what’s been said a long time ago by Jesus, by all other faith leaders: That there is a constant battle between good and evil in the world,” he said.
“Look back in history. Evil never prevailed. Never,” he said. “In the end, goodness and light — everything that’s positive — prevails. How long is it going to take? Well, that’s a different story.”
St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church is continuing to accept donations to send overseas. Details can be found on the flyer below.
Correction: This article has been amended to correct the age of Zhanna Mezhenskay.
The survival of local journalism depends on your support.
We are a small family-owned operation. You rely on us to stay informed, and we depend on you to make our work possible. Just a few dollars can help us continue to bring this important service to our community.
Support RiverheadLOCAL today.
